Leighton Pierce

Experiences in Transformative Time: New Work by Leighton Pierce

“At times, it seems Pierce is capturing the beauty, the ecstasy contained in matter before its inevitable disappearance.”—Mubarak Ali, New Zealand Film Festival

Jack H. Skirball Series

Leighton Pierce’s cinema transforms ordinary sounds and visual impressions into ecstatic experiences filled with new kinds of movements and sensory rediscoveries of the world. Often hovering between definition and abstraction, and between gestural implication and narrative meaning, his musical eye and ear find beauty and magic in everyday places and situations. Pierce’s work has been shown widely at festivals and museums throughout the world, and this screening features an early 9-part 16mm film, 50 Feet of String, along with more recent digital pieces shot in HD, Retrograde Premonition and Peripheral Induction. Fellow experimental filmmaker Jon Jost writes that his work “pulses with a beauty which calls forth agape, its formal structure pointing to the realm of icons… though this sense of religiosity also clearly extols and celebrates sex and sexuality, however visually veiled and discreet Pierce makes it."

In person: Leighton Pierce

Funded in part with generous support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.